Choral Music

Choral Music Concert

Warsaw Philharmonic Choir & Bartosz Michałowski, photo: Bartek Barczyk Works in one part or more, polyphonic and polychoral, religious and secular, in Latin and in French, a cappella and with instruments… It seems impossible to create a short definition of the term ‘motet’ that would take into account all the incarnations of the genre, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The term could indicate both the composition technique, typical of this type of work, and its language or function. It is also not easy to ascertain how many motets Johann Sebastian Bach wrote, not just because we do not know the exact number of his lost works, but also because of the ambiguous generic classification of his surviving legacy, with a chronology that is difficult to establish. They include at least seven works (mostly a due cori and without obbligato instrument parts) with a German text, which are numbered 225 to 230 and 1164 in Wolfgang Schmieder’s catalogue. They follow the tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant motets to biblical words and religious poetry. In Bach’s time, they were mostly performed at funerals – circumstances that did not (generally) allow for pomp and for following new fashions. They could also serve as didactic pieces. The motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, still sung after Bach’s death in St Thomas’s in Leipzig (to the delight of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), for example, could have been used to work with Bach’s pupils.